Tax progressively. Taxation is a huge engine for shaping society, but it isn't doing a very good job these
days. The tax rate for the very wealthiest was 70% in 1981, and now it's 28%. Capital gains taxes have been similarly
slashed, and the inheritance tax is under attack by the Bush adminstration. Conservatives like to argue against
higher taxation by bringing up misleading examples: "Think about what a 70% tax will do to this middle class
family!" or "Look at this widow who had to sell the family farm because she couldn't pay the 'death tax'".
But the whole idea behind a progressive tax is to tax the very rich more and the common people less. A truly progressive
tax increase wouldn't touch the middle class family or the struggling widow; it would only affect the super rich
who currently hide behind the skirts of that poor widow.
Weaken corporate power. Corporations are one of the biggest engines driving the
pump sending water into the wrong fish tank. They harness the power of multitudes of common workers in order to
earn extreme profits for a very few at the top. They may seem to be an unalterable fact of life, but they are actually
a fairly recent invention in the history of the world. We could simply decide not to have them any more if we really
wanted, but at the very least, we can increase their taxes and reduce the corporate welfare we lavish on them.
Strengthen unions. A lot of people have lost sight of the importance of unionization. They see their own unions
not doing much for them except introducing a lot of red tape into their working lives and building up bureaucracies
of their own, but don't stop to think about what their salaries and working conditions might be right now if their
unions hadn't existed for, say, the past 20 years. Corporations have grown so much in power that it's more important
than ever to have opposing institutions big enough to fight them. A cool t-shirt I've seen around reads, "
LABOR UNIONS: THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU WEEKENDS".
Make good choices in daily life. Well, it's hard to say how much personal lifestyle choices
can help, but it would have been equally hard when the first automobiles were being made to imagine that they could
ever actually affect the air over an entire city. But all those cars added up. Aside from the obvious personal
acts of voting and supporting organizations fighting for a more equitable world, we can also be careful about where
our money goes. Patronizing non-corporate (independently owned) businesses, for example, helps more of our money
remain circulating among ordinary people rather than being siphoned up out of our fish tank and into the tank of
the very rich.